falling through stewing steak

Main menu

Tag Archives: kodak

Post navigation

No idea why these advertising light boxes are the way that they are, but they are each end of the S-Bahn platforms at Hamburg Airport. Having walked past them, and occasionally taken the odd digicrap of them, here they are on film. In this case Kodak Portra 800 in the Natura Black.

It turns out that blue lights in a dimly lit underground station are about at close to a torture test as you can get for fast colour negative film. The obviously different light levels really didn’t help with a point and shoot. All of which made them an adventure to process – the white balance still isn’t consistent, but i give up!

Mystery why there are they and never contain any advertising… all other slots are always occupied, with these left open. Maybe they are a token gesture towards making the airport more relaxing / less commercial… or art? Ha!

Depending on the day, i either want to be: shooting for 23 envelope; floating around under the south china sea cataloging coral reefs for future generations (but with a little more style than your average marine biologist); hiking through the mountains of japan shooting buddhist statuary…

That’s a lot of dreams for a man who tends not to leave the house five days a week.

The death of Presto has moved my good friend, and mentor, Thomas, onto Tri-X. I was earnestly trying to convince him that if he wanted interesting grain, he should have a go at developing it in Rodinal. It’s something of a struggle to explain the differences, and no doubt, almost entirely subjective.

The easiest thing is an example, so here is an extreme case:

(click to see it a little larger)

Tri-X in Rodinal @ 20ºC for 13mins. Gentle agitation for the first 30s, and for 5s every minute. Taken using a 6×9 back on a 4×5 Pacemaker Speed Graphic, and an 8″ Dallmeyer-Pentac f/2.9 lens.

I’ve been developing quite a lot of Kodak T-Max 400 recently. One of the problems with the negatives is that they have a purple-ish / pink tint after being fixed. The Kodak support page says the following:

Important: Your fixer will be exhausted more rapidly with these films than with other films. If your negatives show a magenta (pink) stain after fixing, your fixer may be near exhaustion, or you may not have used a long enough time. If the stain is slight, it will not affect image stability, negative contrast, or printing times. You can remove a slight pink stain with KODAK Hypo Clearing Agent. However, if the stain is pronounced and irregular over the film surface, refix the film in fresh fixer.

which suggests to me that the fixing time for Fuji Super Fix is probably longer than the 6mins that i’ve been using… or the fix is close to used up. The latter doesn’t seem likely to me, as the last couple of rolls of Neopan that i developed came out perfectly grey. Although, it does warn that it uses up developer faster than usual film, and the rolls that Manny processed were fine. All very confusing.

It could also be that there is some important difference between the Fuji QuikWash and the Kodak Hypo Clearing Agent… but that doesn’t seem very likely.

The next rolls of T-Max that i process can sit in the Fixer for a good ten minutes! If that doesn’t sort it, it can go in a fresh batch, and at least i’ll know.